When a skipper, who is supposed to lead from the front, fails to deliver, it becomes the responsibility of manager to keep him motivated with positive statements about his skills and how influential he has still been despite having been not so lucky in the field. Manchester United’s highly talented skipper Wayne Rooney is one such player who is missing his touch this season with just one goal to his name until now out of thirteen played games yet manager Louis van Gaal is counting over him for an impressive comeback on the top of board, in fact, Dutchman believes Rooney is still the biggest source of inspiration for other players to deliver their one hundred percent. Sidelining every rumor of having been rust in their relations, Gaal praises his skipper and says, “He’s our captain so that’s very important because his influence is bigger than every other player in our group. He’s a very important player for me, his colleagues, everybody.”
Experts are blaming this drought of goals to the new field spread of the English captain and Van Gaal is solemnly responsible for that change since 29-year-old has never been used to play back but former Real Madrid boss has a strong reason to believe Rooney can be more productive if he plays in the back. Talking about his new role, Gaal added, “He’s a second striker. Our No. 10 is a second striker. That’s what my preference is but sometimes I need another type in midfield. We’ll have to see if he continues with that because Wayne can play in different positions. He’s scored for us in the Champions League. So for me it is not so important who is scoring. We have scored a lot of goals. In the beginning your criticism was we don’t score goals, but now we’ve scored a lot of goals and you’re picking up an individual player and I don’t like that.
“I’m a manager who analyses opponents and give him advice as to how we can disorganise Everton’s defence and then maybe he can score. That is what I’m doing, not only for Wayne but all the players, especially from the view of the team tactics rather than the individual tactics.”
Nonetheless, United fans still rely over their manager’s statement and they are also not ready to accept captaincy has anything to do with Rooney form, Gaal reacted over this, “I think that is true (Captaincy burden). That is true but I don’t believe it with (Rooney), with his personality.”
